Paystream Voices » A Creeping Threat to Healthcare Accounting

A Creeping Threat to Healthcare Accounting - HDHP’s

Posted in PayStream Analyst, Healthcare Revenue Cycle, Contributed, Voices by PayStream Advisors on September 6th, 2007

High Deductible Healthcare Plans, or HDHP’s, are changing the landscape of healthcare providers’ accounting, according to a recent article by the Louisiana Medical News. It surely goes without saying that the multitude of available insurance options, a number growing every day, is problematic for any healthcare institution of any size, and a lack of automation in such a paper-intensive industry is a yoke that is going to become more and more difficult as time goes on. The HDHP threat, it seems, is a similar yet different beast.

Healthcare providers make certain assumptions about patients based upon their available insurance - Historically, these assumptions have boiled down to either “well-covered” or “not-covered.” But HDHP patients foul this system because they appear to be well covered, and perhaps even consider themselves well covered, but in fact their high deductible means quite the opposite. Billing to their insurance company will be met with a relative indifference - the patient is responsible for most, if not all, of their bill, if they have not yet cleared their yearly deductible.

Suddenly a patient goes from a short-term to a long-term payment schedule, requiring entirely different sorts of resources to be billed, tracked, and ultimately settled.

Paystream’s recent whitepaper on healthcare contract management and payment review outlines many of the options available for healthcare revenue cycle automation.

As the number of patients carrying HDHPs grows as corporate plans shrink, there are little options available but to implement automated systems to track and bill them.

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